


of dreams and nightmares

by iihappydaysii



Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, but it's enough about them to warrant the tag i think, dad LJG, idk how to stop, im writing too much, lol, not really john/jamie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-19
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:01:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22805284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iihappydaysii/pseuds/iihappydaysii
Summary: When Willie has nightmares, he goes to parent’s bedroom for comfort
Relationships: Isobel Dunsany/Lord John Grey, Jamie Fraser/Lord John Grey
Comments: 6
Kudos: 89





	of dreams and nightmares

When they first married, Isobel told Grey that this might happen. Though during the day, Willie exploded like gunpowder, a basket of youthful energy and innate recklessness, the nights would snuff out so much of his fearlessness. The boy was plagued, Grey’s wife had said, by nightmares. He’d spent many a night in tears, shivering, in Isobel’s arms until the nightmares turned to smoke and blew away.

It had only been a week into their marriage, the first time it had happened. Willie had wandered into their bed chamber in the middle of the night, round cheeks wet with tears, mumbling incoherently about some horrible black wolf with red eyes that paced around his bed, snarling big curls of white breath in the cold air. The boy had tucked himself under Isobel’s chin and she’d shared a soft look with Grey over Willie’s brown curls.

Over the course of the first year, they were all living together, Willie would come into their room, asking to sleep between them, every one to two weeks. Each and every time they would agree. The requests did slow eventually though, as Willie aged or maybe as he felt a sense of stability. He had a safe home, grandparents that loved him, and a mother and father—which he had, in his mind, never truly had before. He had had a father though, and a wonderful one at that, who had entrusted Grey with his most prized and precious thing. 

Grey would never forget the first time Willie had called him “Papa”. They were in the middle of an argument over his table manners and the boy had snapped at him, “But Papa, I don’t like peas.” 

In that moment, Grey had been so filled with warmth, he’d thought to tell the boy… his _son_ … that he would never, ever have to eat a single pea again. 

He didn’t though, of course, because he _was_ a father now, and growing boys needed their vegetables. 

When Willie came into their room tonight, it had been over two months since the last time.

The boy worked his way onto the mattress, wiggling his way in between them and kicking down at their linens until he could get underneath them. Most nights he would turn in towards Isobel, as he’d done since he was tiny, and cry into her bosom. But tonight, Willie was facing Grey. He was close enough that enough that, even in the dark, Grey could make him out. His eyes were wet with tears, his cheeks streaked.

Isobel looked over at him, her eyes somehow asking him, if he needed her help. “Sleep, my dear,” he whispered to her quietly, then turned his attention to Willie. “Did you have a nightmare?” Grey asked softly.

“No.” Willie sniffed. “It was a… good dream.”

Grey lifted a thumb to the boy’s cheek and swept away a fallen tear. “Then, why are you crying?”

The question was met with nothing but tiny, teared filled breaths. Grey could also hear that his wife had easily fallen back to sleep. Sometime it was easier to wake the dead than it was to wake Isobel. 

“Willie?” Grey prompted, when there had still been no reply.

“Do you remember Mac?” the boy asked slowly, like he was testing out each word for hidden traps. 

Grey’s stomach plummeted. On one hand, he knew what it would mean to Jamie that the boy remembered him, wanted to speak of him, but he also knew Jamie had left so that he wouldn’t.

“Of course,” Grey replied.

“In my dream… we were riding the horses again, and then, we were having picnics like we used to. Me and you and Mac and sometimes Mama.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I woke up, and it was just a dream,” poor Willie started weeping again. “I miss him.” He mopped at his little face with the backs of his small hands. 

Grey shut his eyes, a sharp twist of a knife between his ribs. If there was anything in the world John Grey knew the pain of, it was missing little Willie’s true father—though the boy had loved him without knowing the nature of their relationship. 

He carded a hand through the boy’s curls and let out a breath. “I don’t believe I’ve ever told you this, but my father died unexpectedly when I was young. I was devastated. It hurt so badly, I thought it might kill me and then, one day, my half brother sat me down and he gave me a toy box, filled with wooden frames.” It had been so long since he’d thought of that box, though it was likely still in his mother’s house on Jermyn Street. “There was a small hole in the base of the box and there was a red marble in the box. The purpose of the toy was to move the box around and get the marble through the hole, but that’s not…” Grey let out a breath, the purpose of the toy wasn’t his point now, just as it wasn’t Edgar’s at the time. “My half-brother, he said to me that healing would be like that box and the pain like the red marble. Every time the marble fell through that hole, it would hurt. Time would remove the frames, make the box larger and it would happen less and less often.”

“But it will still _sometimes_ fall through it?” Willie asked. Grey looked his inquisitiveness, the way he looked at the world as a riddle to be solved, as if he could be the one to finally do it.

“Yes,” Grey said, thinking of his own pain. The loss of his father, the loss of Hector, what happened with Percy, the great love of his life being someone he could never have. “And when it does, it will likely hurt just as much as it did the very first time it fell through. You see, Son, time doesn’t patch up the hole in our hearts so it will never hurt again, it just makes our hearts bigger.”

At least Grey hoped that was true, _felt_ that it was, that all he’d lost and suffered through over the years, he’d used like forge to make himself a better man.

Willie moved closer, clutching at Grey’s shirts with his tiny hands. “Papa?”

Grey rested his cheek on Willie’s head. It made him remember how fresh and clean and _new_ the boy had smelled as a baby. He mumbled a gentle reply.

“Promise me you won’t ever die.” Willie’s words were resolute, yet he could not hide the fearful plea behind them. Though Willie had no recollection of his true mother and father, they both died the day he was born, and the closest connection he had, the one he’d had with Jamie Fraser, had been severed for reasons the boy could never understand. In his perfect, fragile heart, he may always feel abandoned. 

“I would promise you that if I could,” Grey said, holding the boy tighter. Willie had so quickly become his entire world—the beat in his heart, the blood in his veins, the bone under his skin. “But I can’t. I will promise you, however, that I’ll never make you a promise that I can’t keep. And, on those terms, I’ll also promise you this: death is the only thing that will take me from you.”

The boy let out a breath, the tension draining from his body. It was hard not to imagine the times when Grey would visit Helwater when Willie was just a baby. He remembered rocking the tiny creature in his arms, staring down at that brown hair, that button nose, those blue eyes and wondering how God managed to fit the contents of all the universe in one impossibly small, impossibly precious package. 

“Good night, Papa,” Willie said with a tiny yawn.

Grey pressed a kiss to the top of the boy’s head. “Good night, Son.”


End file.
